


Seven

by ama



Category: Band of Brothers, The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Canon Era, Canon Jewish Character, Child Abuse, Coming of Age, Cultural References, Domestic Violence, Female Character of Color, Friendship, Gen, Holocaust Mention, M/M, Magic-Users, Non-Graphic Violence, Physical Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Queer Themes, Suicide, Urban Fantasy, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-02
Updated: 2015-06-02
Packaged: 2018-04-02 11:15:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4057933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ama/pseuds/ama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merriell Shelton is surrounded by magic from the day he is born. It is the only thing that stays with him--from the  bayou to the city to the war and back, he finds witches and their spells everywhere.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven

**Author's Note:**

> I pick and choose wildly from various traditions for the magic throughout this fic, mostly because I couldn't find much online, so while almost all the magic depicted is based in a certain culture, it may be altered slightly to work better with the plot. (Notably, nothing-women in Japanese folklore are spirits, not witches.) A few other culture-specific notes will be at the end of the fic.
> 
> Also, throughout this fic the Cajun and Creole characters speak bits and pieces of Louisiana French. If the phrase in question is less than half a sentence, or is something that is easily guessed from context clues, I have left it untranslated. I wanted to make it clear that the character code-switch liberally when comfortable doing so, but I think it would be really inconvenient for y'all to have to constantly scroll down to find a translation for, say, the word "ecoute," when its meaning is more or less understandable in context. Words that are specific to Louisiana French, however, and less commonly heard, are translated in the end note.

i. his mother

For all of his childhood, his mother was his life. She takes pains to ensure it; when he is born, she sews sigils into his baby blankets, surrounding him with love, strength, and protection. She has to do it in secret, because her husband doesn’t like magic. In his bad moods he scowls; in his worse ones, he hits her. Merriell is five the first time he cries “Mame, Mame, laissez-moi” and draws a sloppy sigil for protection on her bruised cheek.

“Merci, bébé,” she murmurs.

A year later, she begins to teach him magic. Merriell has started going to school, and she walks over at the end of the day to escort him home. On the way she teaches him about the plants they see growing on the side of the road. It is on these days that Merriell loves his mother best (and hates his father most, although he rarely spoils these moments by thinking of him). She seems so much stronger in the sunlight, so much happier when enclosed by green and grey trees rather than the peeling walls of their house. She plucks flowers and leaves gently and presses them into his hands and he tries his best to remember their names and uses.

Sometimes, before they go inside, she removes her shoes and steps into the bayou a stone’s throw from their house, wading through the muck without a stutter in her step.

“This is where you were baptized,” she tells him.

“Nuh uh,” he laughs, thinking she is teasing him. “Priests don’t baptize people in the swamp, just in churches.”

“You were baptized in the church, too. But first you were baptized here, dans le bayou. Merriell, bébé, God is good but you can’t trust just Him. Heaven is very far away. Les arbres, de l’eau, les vents, la terre—they are close and kind, and if you love them, they’ll love you, too.”

She points at some of the trees along the edges of the water, and Merriell can faintly sense the nourishing spells drawn on their trunks with charcoal. Moss is draped over them to conceal the marks from prying eyes, but Merriell can feel them. They are as serene and steady as the trees themselves.

“Ecoute,” his mother urges him, but the trees tell him nothing.

Later in the afternoon she teaches him the sigils, writing them out in the flour while she makes bread, drawing them out with grains of rice on the counter. Merriell isn’t too great with reading or writing at school, but the sigils don’t swim in front of his eyes like letters do. He _feels_ them, and he masters them with an alacrity that surprises his mother. He learns potions by her side, too, and spells in bastard French that tastes miles better than the English his schoolteachers try to shove down his throat.

At the same time, slowly, his senses begin to develop. He learns nothing from the trees, flowers, or creatures of the earth, but he starts to understand people. He can tell when they are scared or proud or angry. He has an instinct about how to provoke them any which way, and at first it is only good fun, prodding people, but his mother teaches him in this, too. Magic, like everything else, has rules. _We do not hurt, but we protect our own_. Sometimes Merriell wants to point out that the latter often requires the former—and even if it didn’t, some people, he thinks, ought to be hurt.

But he listens to his mother, and abides by her rules.

-

When Merriell is thirteen, he is home alone one afternoon—mother at the store, father at work—and he gets into mischief. He works up the nerve to steal sips of his father’s bourbon. He doesn’t like the taste but he likes the way it makes him feel, the friendly flames licking up and down his skin. It makes him feel bolder than usual, and so he goes outside and starts carving a sigil into the doorway with his penknife, a surprise for his mother. It’s such a foolish thing, just something meant to bring good luck.

He doesn’t realize that his father has come home until he is suddenly grabbed by the hair and dragged into the house as his father snarls at him, asking him what he thinks he’s doing, broadcasting his foolish devil-work to anyone who might pass by—and Merriell loses it for the first time in his life. He screams and cusses and lists off everything else that ought to shame this family in front of the neighbors, things that only one person has to answer for. His father hits him and Merriell tries to hit him back, but he is a scrawny thirteen-year-old and the worst he can do is give his father a split lip.

By the time his mother comes home, Merriell has two black eyes, bruises all over his ribs and shoulders, bleeding belt-marks on his back, and a broken arm. She takes him not to a doctor but to a traiteur, a kind middle-aged man who lays his hands gently on Merriell’s back and lessens the pain of the bruises, and then teaches his daughter (a girl only a few years older than Merriell himself) how to apply a cast. They sleep there for the night.

Merriell wakes up the next morning to a screaming pain in his side and the sound of his mother and the traiteur speaking in low French.

“You do not have to go back, Annette,” the man says.

“Where else can we go? We have no money; our only friends would be our own people, and where can we hide among our own people where he could not find us?”

“Go farther. Leave Louisiana.”

 _No_ , Merriell thinks, and his mother’s steady voice says, “No. We will not be driven away from our home. Whatever happens, my son and I can bear it.”

“He nearly killed your son last night.”

“Last night—” His mother hesitates. “He is not usually like that. It will not be that bad again.”

She stands and walks into the living room. Merriell closes his eyes, feigning sleep, and his mother sits on the couch beside him. She runs her fingers through his hair. He can practically feel concern dripping off her.

“’M sorry,” he mumbles.

“Pourquoi, mon bébé?” she asks.

Merriell feels a sudden sharp pain in his stomach, like a fist hammering his side, and he feels bile and betrayal rising in his throat. Unconsciously he jerks away from that feeling—away from the woman sitting next to him. She looks at him, her golden-hazel eyes weary and bloodshot.

“What is it, Merriell?”

 _Ecoute_ , she had told him.

“Nothing,” he says.

-

That day, when they return to the house, his father gruffly apologizes, then announces that he has lost his job and that they are going to New Orleans. There are no jobs in New Orleans, either, but there is, occasionally, work that can be found by those waiting to pounce on an afternoon’s paycheck. Merriell looks at his mother, who is pale at the thought of leaving this place—her trees, her gurgling waters, even this hated house that, nevertheless, has hid her secret kitchen-spells. Over the next few days they pack up everything they own, and Merriell could swear that every witch in town visits at some point and takes something away—herbs, boxes of charcoal sticks, the mortar and pestle. He understands. In the packing and unpacking these objects would surely be discovered.

The daughter of the traiteur comes twice—once his mother presses something into her hand and gives her a few quick instructions, and the second time she passes something to his mother in return. She kisses the girl on the cheek and immediately runs outside with a pot and sprigs of betoine and blackberry leaves clutched in her hand. She scoops up a potful of swamp water and tears up the leaves and takes it all inside, ignoring Merriell’s questions. Her husband is out drinking with his friends, so she is perfectly cheerful and unafraid as she sets the pot on the stove and brings the water to a boil. She drops the thing in her hand into the water and begins to mutter to herself in French—spells that make Merriell’s skin prickle as though hot oil was pinging off the surface of the water. At the same time he hears something under his mother’s words, a second person speaking the words at a lower, more gravelly pitch.

“Grandpa taught you this, right?” he says, leaning against the counter. “Have you ever done it before?”

“Not until now, bébé. Va cherche une corde, s’il te plaît.”

Merriell goes through the packing supplies and produces a spool of white string. When he returns to the kitchen he sees his mother dipping her hand into the boiling water without so much as flinching. She fishes out a silver dime with a hole through the center. She holds it out for Merriell to see, a wistful smile on her face.

“My defan papa, he was the best with dimes,” she says. “No boasting—he was the best. People would come from all over for a gris-gris from him. Other candjateurs, they used dimes to bring luck and money, or some used them to keep away curses. Bad curses, real magic ones. Defan Papa, he made dimes that could keep away all bad things. Curses, and also bad thoughts and evil eyes, and demons and sickness and even death. It’s true! No one ever died wearing Papa’s dimes and that’s a fact—although he told them that they must take it off one hour a week, so that le bon Dieu could take them if He wished.”

She cuts a piece of string and weaves it through the hole in the dime. Merriell bows his head as she slips the pendant around his neck and kisses his forehead.

“Merci, mame,” he says as his head spins with memories that do not belong to him: grief, the smell of fresh dirt, the low drone of funeral prayers, a silver coin winking up from inside a grave, the prick of tears at his throat and eyes. “Let me make one for you,” he says.

“Mon cher enfant.” She cups his chin. “Thank you—but no.”

It is one thing for Merriell to hide such an amulet from his father but another thing entirely for his mother to hide it from the man who shares her bed. Heat touches his cheeks.

“Why did you ever take the first one off?” he asks bitterly. “Damn fool thing to do.”

She purses her lips and flicks his ear, but there is no anger in her face.

“It would have faded, Merriell,” she says. “Spells do, when the caster dies. And besides, like I said—you must take it off sometimes. Pour le bon Dieu.”

“Why should I? I ain’t never trusted God— _you_  told me not to, remember?”

His mother pauses, carefully choosing her words, and turns away to begin cleaning the kitchen.

“Demons and saints can do little things,” she says finally, in a slow voice. “Make you sick or make you better. Give you good luck and bad. But God created them all. And even the strongest magic can’t do nothing against the will of God.”

Merriell frowns and reaches up to grasp the dime around his neck. The metal is cool and forgiving to the touch, and power rolls off it in waves that make his nose twitch. He can detect nothing that his mother has not given him before—love, strength, protection—but they are stronger than usual. He lets his hand fall with great reluctance and begins to help his mother pack, thinking idly that he feels safer now, with the dime around  his neck, than he has ever felt in this wretched house.

 

ii. the chandler

In New Orleans, Merriell becomes wild. He has always been “trouble,” because he tells the truth even when it’s mean, because he speaks bad English just for the fun of it, because he is insolent to his teachers and priests. But in the city—oh, the city is what he is made for. He starts cutting class more often than he goes, and he wanders the streets with no guide and no idea of where he is, starts talking to strangers and getting underfoot and staying out late. His father blames the city itself, his mother blames his age, and Merriell blames magic.

Once they reach New Orleans, his fuzzy sense bursts into life. Sensations echo off the brick walls and waft through the air. He can’t walk twenty feet down the sidewalk without drinking in fifty different lives, and he loves it. He hungers for it. The feel of fish flaking apart on his tongue, the faint wail of a newborn, the gentle fizziness of beer, the swoop of joy during an unexpected kiss, the smell of wood varnish sunk into skin—he delights in all of these things and learns more about people than he ever hoped to learn. There are infinite varieties of people, and although he doesn’t like all of them, not by a longshot, he would rather learn about them than sit behind a school desk all day.

(He would rather wander the streets than sit in their dismal apartment where his mother wilts without her bayou and without her spells, sustained only by visits to the few friends she has made in this city, where his father’s erratic and unpredictable work schedule makes everything uncertain.)

The only thing that he dislikes about this is the pain, which is constant. Little hurts and big ones, pains of the soul, the body, the ego. He becomes better at causing pain, but he also starts to go out of his way to prevent it. He’s clumsy with kindness, but he learns to be better with his fists. As soon as the cast comes off his arm he starts coming home with bruises and split knuckles and lips. His mother despairs, but Merriell is fourteen and thinks of himself as superhero. He starts to learn his own strength; he waits desperately for an opportunity to pick a fight with his father, but the weeks and months stretch on and no such opportunity presents itself. He wonders if his mother’s dime has something to do with it, but he is not desperate enough to take it off and find out.

One hot May afternoon, Merriell is flitting through the streets of New Orleans, ducking through back alleys and around buildings, when he feels the tug of magic at his feet. He obeys eagerly; he finds pockets of magic everywhere in this city, and he’s always fascinated by the way it feels both different and the same. He pauses before a small candle shop. It is Sunday and the store is closed, but he can feel magic molding itself, and as he approaches he can hear a faint voice humming. He slips around the back of the building and peeks around the corner.

“Ain’t nothing for you here,” a sharp voice says immediately. “Vat-en!”

Merriell hesitates, then boldly he walks around the corner of the building and puts his hands in his pockets.

“Wasn’t doing nothing,” he says sulkily.

The witch stands and steps in front of her workspace, her heels clacking against the cobblestone. Merriell stares. He can’t help it—his first thought, foolishly, is that she doesn’t _look_ like a witch. It’s a silly thought because witches don’t look any certain way, but he can’t shake the feeling that the woman before him looks more like a secretary than anything else. She is perhaps thirty or thirty-five years old, black, with a rather square jaw and her hair pulled back neatly, still a head taller than Merriell even after he’s had his first growth spirt. She is wearing a smart brown skirt and a neatly-buttoned white blouse, and Merriell could never, ever picture her taking off her sensible shoes and wading into a bayou with her hair coming undone around her shoulders.

“I don’t like little boys who spy,” she says, folding her arms. She nods imperiously at the mouth of the alley and says “Vat-en,” again.

There is a strange smell wafting from behind her and Merriell tries to look past her, eyes fixed curiously on the open door between the building and the alley. He thinks he can see a stove, and the table behind the woman is crowded with things, although he can’t tell what they are.

“What kinda candjateuse are you, anyway?” he asks. “Why d’you need so much stuff? Are you a traiteuse?”

“Non.”

The woman meets his gaze, her jaw set and stubborn, and Merriell has a flash of intuition.

“You’re making _candles_ with _magic_ ,” he says triumphantly. The witch’s eyes roll heavenward.

“God preserve me from little tout-dans-les-monde boys who spy. Who sent you, eh? If it was Louis, you may go right back and tell him to go to the Devil, because only that Old Man will ever be able to teach him my secrets.”

“No one sent me,” Merriell says impatiently. “Don’t see why you have to use magic on candles. Why not just make ’em the regular way? Can’t be that hard.”

The woman looks at him, pursing her lips, and swiftly turns around—and then back around again, holding a slim, pale blue pillar candle.

“You ain’t lying to me?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Prove it.” She rubs the tips of two fingers together and presses them to the candle wick, and it bursts into flame. “No one lies to Saint Jean le Baptiste,” she says, and without warning she grasps Merriell’s arm and tips the candle over it, so a bead of wax falls onto the soft skin of his forearm. To his surprise, he feels no heat—he doesn’t even blink.

“Well,” the witch comments dryly. “You are not spying after all. Still a little tout-dans-les monde boy, though, I think.”

“’M fourteen,” Merriell says resentfully, and she smiles—a small, hard-won smile just at the edge of her lips.

“And now you go, you buy a candle, or you make yourself useful,” she declares as she sits down at the table.

The choice is not a difficult one, and Merriell promptly leans closer to learn and observe. He learns quickly, as he often does when he’s interested in something, and soon he is put to preparing the wicks. The witch melts wax on the stove, and sifts it through a wire sieve, and adds colors, oils, and occasionally a muttered spell or prayer. Merriell dips the wicks in salty water and cuts them the right length, and after half an hour or so the witch permits him to help make the candles themselves, dipping the wick into the melted wax and lifting it up again until the candle builds around it, layer by layer. Sometimes, instead, she has a glass container prepared, often with a saint’s portrait plastered on the front, and he ties the wick around a thin piece of wood so that it lies straight up and down while she pours the wax inside.

Candles are curious things, he decides. He’s used to knowing magic, feeling it in his fingertips, but candles are oddly blank. They occasionally have flavors of this spell or the other, but they’re made carefully to adapt to the burner’s wishes.

He gains a bit more from the witch herself, although she doesn’t tell him her name or, really, anything not to do with the making of candles. After a while, though, when they’ve reached a comfortable rhythm, she begins to sing in a low, pleasing voice. They’re Creole songs, some totally strange to him, some nearly identical to those his mother sings. In her voice he hears other people—one a man, older by more than a decade, a brother, he decides, and the other a grandmother. He feels scraped knees on cobblestones and thinks that she probably belongs to the city as much as he does, and has lived here for far longer. At one point they make a candle with cherry blossom oil and Merriell learns, to his utmost amusement, that she is unmarried but has a series of young men in rotation. He thinks about teasing her about it, but he decides that, for now, he ought to keep his particular gift a secret.

“Bien,” she says finally, and Merriell is startled to realize that several hours have passed and that he will be late for dinner. “Ça suffit. Take the rest of these inside for me.”

Merriell obeys and piles the candles among all the others onto the table beside the stove. The room is unbearably hot, and he follows willingly as the woman walks through it to the front of the shop. It’s a wonderful little place, packed full of candles and scents and memories and impressions that make his head spin. The woman opens the register and counts out a quarter and three dimes and holds them out.

“Merci,” he says, surprised, and wondering if he’ll be able to buy and eat a 10-cent bag of pralines on the way home without getting caught.

“I open tomorrow at nine o’clock. Come on time or not at all.”

“Really?” Merriell blurts, startled.

“Oui. I have a need for someone who can listen well and knows a bit of magic. You may call me Miss Delphine. Et toi, qu’est ce que tu t’appelle?”

“Merriell Shelton.”

“Bon. Now, finally, vat-en.”

-

The next day, Merriell arrives at the candle shop promptly at nine. He is put to work stocking the candles that had been made the day before. Not all the customers, Delphine tells him, are witches, so the Catholic candles and the ones just made to smell pretty go on the shelves at eye-level and waist-height, because those sell to anybody. The ones more obviously meant for hoodoo go on the very bottom shelves, so you have to bend down to fetch them—and Merriell often has to do that himself, because many of the old men and women interested in those things can’t bend their knees so well anymore. The shop sells other things, too, at the counter: pens and ink, postcards, charcoal sticks, rosaries and scapulae, cigarettes and cigars and chewing tobacco. Delphine smokes cigars but she tells Merriell he’s too young and won’t give him any cigarettes. Not until he’s fifteen, she says.

Around three o’clock, when business is slow, Delphine asks him how good he is with math. She tests him, pretending to be a customer and giving him sums to do, and he gives the right answer every time—but then she tests him on the inventory and he’s not as good, because the store is small but it is filled right to the top with candles in a thousand different shapes, sizes, colors, and spells. “I’ll give you a week to learn it,” she promises. “Then we’ll see.” For now, though, she doesn’t leave him alone in the shop, but she gives him a shopping list and some money and has him run errands—after dabbing a bit of wax from a Saint Nicholas candle (patron saint of shopkeepers and _repentant_ thieves) on his arm. Merriell buys everything she needs and begs a cigarette off a group of men playing marbles on their stoop, and smokes it before he reaches the shop. Delphine smells it on him, rolls her eyes, and loudly prays that God grant strength to his poor mother. Merriell, fresh off a coughing fit, grins.

He returns home for dinner that night and is pleased to see that his father is not home; he presents all $3 of the day’s wages to his mother. Her eyes widen and she looks prepared to scold him, so he quickly says “I got a job, Mame,” and explains.

“Well, I like a job better than running wild, at least,” she mutters. “And I think perhaps I have heard of this Delphine… not quite one of our people, but better than a stranger…” She kisses him on the cheek and hands the money back. “Bien. Tres bien, Merriell. Here, don’t give the money to me—take a little bit for yourself, and give the rest to your father when he comes home.”

Merriell is horrified.

“But—” He protests, but says nothing further because they have never really discussed it. They have never _needed_ to. He doesn’t know how to discuss it.

His mother smiles sadly.

“The bills must still be paid, mon cher.”

-

Merriell leaves school and begins to work at the candle store full time. Well, more or less full time. Delphine cannot always pay him, so sometimes she pays him in lessons instead. He learns candle-magic, which his mother dislikes—too impatient, she says, fire is too self-important—and sometimes, when there is no money to be had and nothing to learn, he just continues his jaunts around the city. He often arrives home late, now, later than either of his parents, and sees his mother only in the mornings and on Sundays. He hardly sees his father at all, which suits him fine; on the days he works, he wordlessly leaves a dollar and fifty cents on his father’s dresser, and keeps the remainder for his own use or for the landlord, when he comes knocking because the elder Shelton had not paid the rent after all.

He doesn’t try to give money to his mother again, and he doesn’t try to convince her to leave his father. He decides, with the cruel callousness of the young, that she has given up. Of course he pities her, feels affection for her—but it seems, now, that they have very little in common, and the space between them grows.

When he is seventeen, he comes home late one night and finds his mother dead in her bed.

Doll’s eye, the doctor says. They sell it in witchcraft stores, Merriell thinks but doesn’t say. Usually used in bad magic—his mother almost never bought any. Suicide, the doctor says with his eyes only. Merriell knows what he's thinking, and he knows why she did it, but he doesn't say that, either.

Officially, her death is an accident, and she is buried in a crowded Catholic graveyard in the middle of the city she hated. Lots of people come to the funeral, even a few from their old town. His father cries, big fat pathetic tears that make Merriell furious. He wants to shake him, punch him, ask him how _dare_ he cry, but he doesn’t because he wants to hear the priest. It’s a good priest, with a nice kind voice, and he reads a good service that Merriell thinks his mother would enjoy. His friend Gene stays by his side, and he takes off his spelled dime (the magic hasn’t faded yet, though he knows it will) and holds it tight in his fist to keep himself calm. On the day his grandfather died, he knows that his mother took off her own amulet and cast it into the grave to lie with him, but he can’t bear the thought.

After the service, Delphine comes up to him and presses two things into his hand: a small votive candle, and the key to the empty apartment over the shop. He doesn’t ask how she knows, but the next day he moves out of his father’s apartment and into this one. It is small and a bit empty, and has the musty smell of a room that has just been dusted for the first time in years, but Merriell appreciates it.

He thanks the friends who helped him carry his things, assures them that he doesn’t want company but that he will speak to them soon, sits on the bed and lights a cigarette—and then, because he has the matches out, lights the candle that Delphine gave him. It’s magicked, he can tell in an instant, and as he inhales he feels a curious calmness spreading through his body. Not comfort. Nothing like a lullaby or a hug or a kiss on the forehead—there’s nothing motherly about it, really. He’s known Delphine for years now and there is nothing particularly motherly about her, though she can be a good boss, a good friend, a good aunt. Instead, the candle feels _bracing_ , like the wind coming in off the ocean or a firm pat on the back.

There is something dead in his heart, some ugly tumor of grief and guilt and bitterness and misery, and Merriell does not know if he can be as happy as he once was, if he was ever happy, but as the night begins to fall around him, he thinks that he might be able to survive.

(He still weeps, though, all through the night, as the candle slowly burns out.)

 

iii. the nothing woman

Merriell doesn’t do magic in the Marines. It feels wrong, somehow. Magic is meant for things that you know, really know on a personal level—homemade blankets, presents, your house, plants you nurture with your own hands, your friends and family and neighbors. Not scratchy army-issue blankets and trees that grow strong and fat on rains that curdle hate in your heart and men who will die before a sigil even has time to fade.

And besides—magic is private. Merriell learned it in a corner of the kitchen when the house was empty, or outside, where there were no neighbors around for a mile in any direction. It’s not something he shares with strangers. He recognizes a handful of witches here, but none of them are Cajun, and to his surprise, none of them recognize him in return. One or two should, even without a gift like he has; other Cajuns and Creoles always manage to find each other, but these men don’t. So he keeps his secret to himself. He has to grit his teeth when men from outside of Louisiana crack jokes about _voodoo witch doctors_ ; he won’t take a chance getting caught and adding fuel to that fire. (Once, in Melbourne, a Marine teases him for the way that French slips uncontrollably into his mouth when he drinks, and he relieves months of frustration by punching two teeth in. Lieutenant Jones, his new platoon leader whom everyone calls Hillbilly for his accent and his backwoods mountain songs, gives him a stern lecture and a few days in the brig, but when he gets out, he, Burgie, and De L’Eau all mysteriously have liberty passes and the offenders do not.)

Cut off from part of his soul, cut off from a world that isn’t war, he gets a new name—Snafu—situation normal, all fucked up. That’s how he feels most of the time. He is in a constant state of _wounded_ , fucked up but still okay, still able to fight, survive, kill. And in a constant state of waiting. Waiting for something to come along that pushes him past “normal.” It will be his turn soon, he thinks, one night when he sits in his foxhole with Sledge, who has managed to survive intact for longer than expected, thinking about Lieutenant Jones and Captain Haldane and Gunny Haney, who haven’t. Maybe he’ll be promoted soon: Snafu to Fubar. Fucked up beyond all recognition. He grins wryly. He doesn’t really recognize himself now.

Snafu closes his eyes and lets out a deep breath. Even his senses are dulled here. It’s more like the bayou than New Orleans, and he wasn’t made for this. He misses the city. He misses… a lot of things.

-

He sees her work before he sees her. Strings tied around children’s wrists and necks that seem just a little bit too bright against the muck. Smooth skin, untouched by rocks and shells and whatever else leaves its mark on everyone who steps foot on this godforsaken island. Love. A sense of love that does not belong here, that permeates the air and makes him wary.

After a few days he recognizes her. She is an Okinawan woman, with very little to mark her different from any of her fellows except for Snafu’s other sense. He doesn’t feel anything. He very consciously feels nothing—no pain, no fear, no resentment or anything else. She is a nothing woman, and while her countrymen are meekly led by the Americans around them she slips away. Snafu isn’t always sure how she does it. Once, he knows, a shell lands nearby and in the resulting spray of blood and screams she falls down, carefully cushioning the babe in her arms, and plays dead. The child, too, is quiet, and when Snafu cocks his head he sees movement, a small black snake that winds around its feet and keeps it calm. He sees the snake often, afterwards, always with the same woman. A familiar. He’s never seen one before, although he’s heard of them.

Sometimes when he sees her he senses her determination, but most often he thinks of her as the nothing woman.

One night the radio is giving off nothing but static and he is sent to deliver a message to another company, one closer to the ever-wavering line and the Okinawan villages that are still caught between the fire. He walks slowly, slowly back, and sees her duck into a small house that is almost ready to collapse. Without thinking, he follows her. He stands beside the window and peers in, and sees the nothing woman approach a small family. An old woman and a young one, both already wounded, with dried tears on their faces and children at their knees. A baby and a girl of five or six.

The nothing woman approaches them and holds out her arm, and the snake slips down it and onto the baby’s chest. It slithers in a small loop around the baby’s body as the woman whispers spells that make Snafu’s heart pound. He knows these spells; they are no different than the ones that his mother wove into his blankets when he, too, was a babe, and he is hit with such familiar love and willpower that he almost blinks back tears. The process repeats itself with the girl, who squirms uncomfortably at the snake’s touch, and the nothing woman wraps blue threads around the children’s wrist. The mother and the old woman thank her, and she leaves.

She freezes at the sight of Snafu and he speaks without considering the language barrier.

“They’ll kill you if they find you,” he tells her. “They’ll think you’re a spy for the Japs.”

Her eyes are wide with fear and she speaks to him in a trembling voice. She doesn’t understand, so he takes off his dog tags and hands them to her. His spelled dime is strung onto them, and as soon as her fingers touch it she recognizes it and becomes calm. Her baby is strapped to her back. She points to him and then holds up two fingers.

“You had two kids?” he says, and she hesitates and nods.

 _No one else must suffer as I did_ , she says, or he thinks she says. _Soon I will be done, and they will all be safe_.

A few days later, three children die in front of him, and Snafu wishes he could still mourn like Hamm does, but all he can think is that she missed three.

-

The night after that, Snafu sees her again; she has made it behind the line and is being evacuated with a group of other women, no longer calm but splattered with blood and dust, and with unshed tears in her eyes and voice. She stops in her tracks, the other women flowing around her like a stream around a jagged rock, and holds her baby out, a rapid bubbling of words coming from her lips. Snafu doesn’t understand, knows that she is trying to give away her baby and isn’t sure why. Her gaze flickers over the scattered marines, searching for him—

He realizes what’s going on the same moment Sledge does, when they glimpse the dynamite strapped to her chest. There is a shot and a spark and an explosion. No spell is powerful enough to stop that.

Then there is shooting and they are being shelled with their own goddamn artillery and Snafu has to run, animal fear taking over his mind and driving everything else away, everything except _whistle over your right shoulder, solid ground there, mud over there must avoid, dust obscuring vision but keep going, keep going, breathe_. They outrun death this time and Snafu falls heavily onto the ground and thinks to wonder if the blood on his face belongs to the nothing woman or her child.

He lifts his hands up and rests them on his helmet, thinking, maybe, to push it off and bow his head and pray for the dead. Or maybe to take it off entirely, cast it away and wade out into the ocean until he drowns or finds his way home, whichever comes first.

But he feels Sledge looking at him. Feels the undercurrent of Sledge’s thoughts, surprise because Snafu is tired Snafu is never tired, and bones aching everything aching can’t be here anymore, and cloying bitterness bleeding into rage. Sledge is not allowed to feel these things. Neither is Bill Leyden or Hamm or Peck. They are not allowed to drown, when they die they must die with unburdened souls, because they need to be protected and Snafu needs someone to protect.

“Y’alright, Sledgehammer?” he asks on autopilot as he removes a cigarette from his pocket. Sledge nods. Snafu lights his smoke, stands, and walks away.

-

The young woman is dead. The old woman is dead. The little girl is gone, he doesn’t know where. But the baby is alive.

Snafu stares down at it, at the blue thread tied around its wrist, at its face scrunched up as it screams. He lets the child’s pain wash over him and wonders how the nothing woman’s spell could possibly still be active. Spells fade quickly after death, unless they are made with power—and there is no way that every single spell, granted to every child on Okinawa, had that power. No way. No one could have such love in them. No grief could be that strong.

He says something about mortars for Sledge, but he hardly listens to himself. His head is spinning with the baby’s confusion and panic, and when the child’s flailing arm brushes the waxy corpse of its mother, he flinches. He knows that feeling. He _knows_ it, he has such empathy for this child that his stomach aches because his mother, too, is dead, and he knows the way a corpse feels and empathy should make him kind, shouldn’t it? Empathy should make him pick the baby up and cradle him and whisper protective spells just like the nothing woman did. But it doesn’t. Snafu’s soul is broken, and empathy brings nothing with it but revulsion.

Mac comes in and picks up the baby and takes it away. Snafu stumbles out after him, fingers patting down his jacket, trying to find his cigarettes. He wonders when he will die and hopes that it’s soon, because God, he’s tired of waiting.

 

iv. the traiteur

There is a cross carved discreetly into Gene Roe’s doorframe. Snafu reaches up to touch it for half a second, impressing his good intentions into the worn-velvet wood, and he opens the door and walks through to the kitchen without a second’s thought.

“Anyone home?” he calls as he begins to unload the contents of a cardboard box onto the table.

He has brought two Raphael candles, two dimes with holes stamped through them, a rosary, geraniums, a lighter, a mortar and pestle, a stick of charcoal, and two envelopes with addresses written on them. And a sealed container of jambalaya, a six pack of beer, and a bag of pralines, because his mama always taught him to never be stingy with someone if you were asking them for a spell.

“Mary, you ever think of calling before you show up at my door?” Gene says crossly, appearing with a towel wrapped around his waist and his dark hair dripping on his forehead.

“Never, boo,” Snafu says with a real grin as he wraps an arm around Gene’s waist and kisses his cheek. His skin is wet and warm and Snafu presses a more scandalous kiss to his jaw, but Gene only chuckles and pushes him away.

“Chiennailleur,” he accuses.

“Toujours, mon cher.”

He tries to return to the table, to give Gene a moment to get dressed, but before he manages it Gene reaches out and seizes his wrist, eyes staring off into the distance as a frown worries his face. He heaves a heavy sigh.

“Merriell…”

“I need a gris gris,” Snafu says, ignoring him as he goes back to the table and begins to sort things out neatly. “A good one.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“Not for me.”

“Merriell—”

“I don’t wanna hear it, Gene,” Snafu says warningly. Without looking up he lights a cigarette. “I ain’t giving you my pain, and I won’t peek at yours. We have a deal, don’t we?”

“You peek anyway,” Gene mutters. He leaves the room, undoubtedly still frowning.

It is true, and Snafu accepts the accusation without much guilt. He had met Eugene Roe when he was fourteen, just after his family moved to New Orleans. Gene lived with his mother just two houses down, and although his mother wasn’t Cajun, she had still been plenty willing to visit with Snafu’s mother and swap recipes and gossip about a few mutual friends. The boys had been thrown together constantly; Snafu had spent summers with Gene and his grandma in Golden Meadow. They have been friends, conspirators, occasionally lovers, and as such have virtually no boundaries between each other. Snafu has always been a shade less sensitive, more vicious. Gene trusts people and Snafu doesn’t, so he is the one who protects them from nosy neighbors, landlords who sneer, the men they meet on street corners who hate themselves just a shade too much to be safe, even for a night.

And Gene is the one who patches him up. It’s not always the easiest task. He knows how to brew potions and make salves, stitch cuts and set bones, and that, of course, is simple. But that’s being a medic—years before war was a thought in anyone’s mind, Gene was learning to be a medic—not being a traiteur. A traiteur lays their hands on their patients, lifts the pain away and bears it themselves until they can convince God to ease it from their own body. Snafu had never liked the process, even when the pain Gene lifted away was nothing more than, say, the pain of a twisted ankle that makes it hard to hobble up and down the stairs to his apartment. He acquiesced, though, because he knew that these wounds are easily healed.

The moment Snafu arrived home from war, when Gene had seized his hand to pull him into a hug and froze instead, his eyes glazed over and his lips twisted slightly in shock and distress, his friend had started offering his services, and Snafu had started refusing him. Because he, too, knows something of Gene’s suffering. He can’t help himself from feeling it. Hot blood squelching between his fingertips, the stench of dead bodies piled onto one another, a deep, impenetrable cold lurking at the edges of his thoughts. War is not an easily-healed pain. Gene has enough to worry himself with, and Snafu won’t add to it.

Not for himself, at least, he thinks as he stares blankly at the envelopes on the kitchen table. His cigarette burns down and he discards it in a convenient ashtray, and lights another.

“God, Merriell, what’s all that for?” Gene says, eyebrows rising as he enters the kitchen again. Snafu comes back to himself with a start and pulls a pan from the counter to start heating the jambalaya.

“Didn’t know how you’d want to work, if you can’t actually touch the people you’re healing. So I brought options.”

“Dimes, Mary? I ain’t never used dimes in my life. And I’ve got my own mortar and pestle, you know that.”

“I just thought I’d be sure. You gonna help me or not?”

“I’ll do my best. What am I healing?”

“Souls. Not bodies.”

“How?”

“What d’you mean how? I’m not the traiteur.”

“Different kinds of wounds, Merriell,” Gene says as he begins to set up his space. He places the candles in front of him and the envelopes in front of those, and rubs the limp petals of the geraniums between his fingertips appraisingly. “Someone just getting plain tired is different than someone who’s afraid, or someone who’s seen bad things about themselves, or someone who needs a shrink. Just need to know what I’m working with.”

“Plain tired, I think,” Snafu replies. He stirs the jambalaya slowly and thinks about Sledge asleep on the train.

Behind him, he hears the faint scratch of charcoal as Gene begins to draw sigils on the tabletop, murmuring to himself in low French mixed with English. He lights the candles next, and as he does so Snafu can hear him whispering Sledge and Burgie’s names. He turns around, leaning against the counter, and watches as Gene closes his eyes and lays his palms gently down on the table, covering the envelopes and the sigils beneath them.

Gene doesn’t work magic the same way Snafu’s mother did. In this part of the world, there were three kinds of witches: those who thought their powers came from God, those who credited the Devil, and those who didn’t put much faith in either. Snafu and his mother were the third kind. If anything, Snafu would say the earth itself was the source of their magic. His mother, at least, had always drawn strength from the trees, the water, her gardens, the flowers. Snafu always knew she was too good to have anything to do with the Devil, but he never put much faith in God, either.

Gene, though, is a believer, and Snafu has always loved listening to him work his spells. When no one’s life is at stake, at least, Gene’s magic is calm, measured, and unhurried. He has faith. That’s all. Faith.

As the spell progresses, Snafu begins to feel calmer, more at home in his own skin, less anxious. He realizes what’s happening, and when Gene opens his eyes and blows out the candles, Snafu is glaring at him.

“I told you not to,” he snaps.

Gene holds up the envelope from Burgie silently. It is a wedding invitation; his name and return address is in the corner, and in the center is Snafu’s.

“I can’t help it when your name’s there, too, Merriell. I sent most of it to them, but you got caught in the middle. You could thank me.”

He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, his face pale, and Snafu feels a stab of guilt.

“Merci,” he mumbles. Then, after a second of hesitation, he slides into Gene’s lap and kisses him. Gene kisses him back a little, but he’s tired—Snafu can feel the echo of sunlight against his skin and knows that Gene has worked all day in the heat, so he runs his hand lazily through Gene’s hair and presses soft, soothing kisses to his neck. “I want you,” he mumbles, startled by the force in his own voice, the sudden longing for something as familiar and uncomplicated as a night spent in bed with someone who loves him.

Gene doesn’t really pull away—he doesn’t have to. Snafu catches a glimpse of red hair (and cheeks, and the tip of a nose), and a chuckle in his ear and a blanket pulled taught across multiple bodies, and he withdraws. He tries to keep his face blank and says “Sorry” abruptly as he stands.

“It’s not—” Gene says, embarrassed. “It’s not anything, Mary. We’ve never…”

They were sixteen, the first time Snafu found an enclave in the city that catered to _men like them_. They had celebrated by drinking and laughing too loudly and fucking sloppily in Gene’s bed, trying to stifle the noise so they would not wake his mother. That was when Gene had started calling him _Mary_ , imitating the men at the bar in a way that felt, somehow, more personal. Since then they’ve had several lovers each, mostly casual but occasionally serious, and Snafu has watched Gene fall in love more than once. It doesn’t hurt. It never has.

The jambalaya is simmering, bubbles popping and splattering Gene’s stove with red sauce. Snafu returns to the stove and stirs the pan.

“You’re just a romantic,” he says with a bit of a smirk, and Gene chuckles in acknowledgment.

“Yeah.”

He stands, too, and hugs Snafu round the middle, resting his head on Snafu’s shoulder.

“Tell me about your friends,” he says.

Snafu opens his mouth and closes it and shakes his head as he stirs. His throat is thick with tears and he’s embarrassed, too—not because of Gene’s beau, whoever and wherever he is, but because he’s never been rejected by Gene before and can’t believe he has never prepared himself for the possibility, and because he hasn’t responded to either of the letters sitting on the table and he never will, because even if he were that good at writing he couldn’t muster the words, because he didn’t say goodbye to Sledge, because the food he’s heating up right now isn’t as good as Gene’s grandmother’s and he knows that, because even with an unasked-for spell settling underneath his skin he still feels as maimed and hopeless as he did on Okinawa.

“Je t’aime,” Gene says softly as Snafu begins to cry, and he hugs him just a bit tighter. “Je t’aime.”

 

v. the mourner

He goes back to working at the candle shop without much pause. Delphine says welcome back and cracks a smile, but she doesn’t ask any questions and Snafu doesn’t offer any info, except a few wise remarks about how she must’ve missed him. His apartment is the same, Delphine is the same, the shop is the same—except even more cramped and crowded now, because Delphine has started a flirtation with a gardener who gets her plants for cheap, and now they offer a few common kinds of herbs and flowers in addition to the candles. Some of their regulars are confused and ask why their candle shop is now also a florist shop. Others, candjeteurs, are delighted.

The conflicting smells are overpowering, of course, but Snafu prefers the smell to the stench of dead bodies and rotting coconuts, so he doesn’t complain. His other sense adjusts, too; he tried to tamper it down when he was at war, surrounded by hundreds of other guys whose fears and nostalgic longings were amplified beyond all reason, but now he finds that he can take it in again. He lets the magic of the city and its people wash over him, and feels at home.

One afternoon a woman walks into the shop decked out in the full marine dress uniform complete with a brass globe and anchor pinned to her lapel. Snafu freezes for a moment because he knows an officer when he sees one and his instinct is that he must be doing something wrong—or nothing wrong, but he will soon be ordered up and towards something unpleasant anyway. Then he remembers that he is an honorably discharged man, and he salutes the woman lazily.

“Were you in the service?” she asks.

“Yes ma’am,” he says with an indolent grin. “United States Marine Corps, K/3/5.”

“Didn’t they teach you to stand when you salute a higher-ranking Marine, over in K/3/5?”

“Ain’t a Marine no more,” Snafu shrugs. “Duration plus six. I’m out.”

“Fair enough,” the woman says, nodding to acknowledge a point scored. She steps up to the counter and places her purse down, looking warily at her surroundings. “My name’s Basilone, Lena Basilone. I’m looking for something, and someone directed me here.”

Snafu raises an eyebrow, waiting, but she does not elaborate.

“You need a spell,” he says finally, and Sgt. Basilone looks both relieved and embarrassed.

“Yes. I don’t really know what I’m doing. I never paid much attention to this kind of thing when I was young. Not that I think it would have helped.”

“I got candles and flowers and fresh plants—take your pick—and behind the counter we got dry herbs and rocks and rosaries and all that shit.”

He almost apologizes immediately for language, but Lena Basilone is a true Marine—she doesn’t even blink.

“I’m at a loss,” she shrugs. “I need something for a memory spell, and I’ve never worked one before.”

“You want a Anthony candle?” Snafu offers.

“Not that kind of memory,” she says.

She has a brisk, businesslike voice but it suddenly softens, turns tender, and she reaches into her purse and pulls out a photograph. She holds it out for Snafu to see but doesn’t let go of it. It’s a small snapshot of a Marine, a dark-haired man with a medal of honor around his neck. Snafu looks up.

“Oh.”

 _That_ Basilone.

“My husband and I only knew each other a few months,” the sergeant says in a calm voice as she puts the picture in her purse and snaps it shut. “My memories of him haven’t faded or blurred together, but I know it’s only a matter of time. If—if we had had years together, maybe it wouldn’t matter, forgetting little bits and pieces, but… I want to remember him.”

Snafu nods slowly, considering her request and the types of magic that might fill it. He also considers the woman before him. He had never really met any of these lady Marines before, although he’d heard of them; he shipped out too early. Most people seemed to think they were either loose women, trying to snag a military man (or two or three) in the easiest way possible, or else were grumpy old spinsters and tomboys who didn’t know how to be a proper woman at all. Well, Lena Basilone _had_ snagged herself a military man—but Snafu guesses, by the faint creases at her mouth and eyes and the squareness of her shoulders, that she is also familiar with being called a spinster or a tomboy. She is not, he thinks, a romantic kind of woman at all. Not the kind to be whisked off her feet by a national hero who dies too young, and not the kind of woman who comes to New Orleans looking for a magic spell.

He realizes that she must have loved her husband very much, and feels a stab of pity and envy.

Just then, the door opens behind him and Delphine enters the store, and Snafu turns to her for advice. He gives a brief explanation of the situation, and says, “I don’t know whether a potion, a ouanga, or an amulet would work better.”

“Not a ouanga,” she replies immediately. “It fades too quickly and you don’t notice when it’s gone. An amulet you see all the time, you remember to renew it.”

“But an amulet you gotta keep on you all the time, right? It won’t work if she takes it off.”

 _Pour le Bon Dieu_ , he thinks sardonically. He still wears the dime around his neck, for decoration if nothing else.

“True…” Delphine says slowly. “Madame, what kind of magic did you learn when you were a girl?”

“I mostly didn’t,” Sgt. Basilone says ruefully. “It was just one more thing that I had to do and my brothers didn’t, and I always hated that. And magic seemed like… well. Old World superstition.” She pauses thoughtfully. “There were a lot of potions, I think. Herbs, creams, stuff like that, for healing mostly, or good luck. My nona was always drawing crosses on my forehead in olive oil—one time she used an egg dipped in holy water to protect my brother from the Evil Eye.”

Snafu and Delphine glance at each other.

“Easier to stick with what you start with,” he suggests, and she nods.

“Oui. Forget-me-nots and a pinch of rosemary. And, peut-être, something for devotion, everlasting love, something of the kind.”

“Yarrow,” Snafu says, thinking back to those after-school walks with his mother. Delphine turns towards the sergeant and starts listing off the things she needs and the prices.

“Merriell will work the spell for you for an extra fifty cents,” she adds at the end.

“I’d like to do it myself,” Sgt. Basilone says quickly.

“But you’ll need help.”

The woman’s lips twitch.

“Yes,” she admits with the utmost reluctance. “I’ll need help.”

She picks out the relevant plants and pays for them, and Delphine takes command of the front of the shop while Snafu and Sgt. Basilone go through to the back. Snafu takes a Saint Michael candle with him and places it on the table as Sgt. Basilone begins to pluck the petals off the forget-me-nots, and each little bud off the yarrow blooms. Wordlessly he fills a kettle with water and sets it in front of her. Then, after a brief pause, he hands her a pack of matches and she lights the candle herself. He places the kettle on a little stand, directly over the flame, and Sgt. Basilone adds all the plant matter that will fit, and they wait in silence for the water to boil.

It is an uncomfortable silence. The woman is clearly unused to doing this, especially in a place like this, and Snafu doesn’t know what to make of a Marine whose memory of the corps consists—as far as he can tell—of parade marches, telegrams, and a line of uniformed bridesmaids and groomsmen. Sgt. Basilone looks like she just walked off of a recruiting poster, and beside her he feels… shabby. It’s a feeling he’s annoyingly familiar with, and he doesn’t like it.

“I’ve never met a man who knew magic before,” Sgt. Basilone comments after a minute or two has elapsed.

“I’ve never met a woman who was in the Marines.”

“There are quite a few of us.”

“Us too.” He pauses and adds, “It’s how it goes here. I learned from my ma, who got it from my grandpere. Delphine got it from her brother who got it from an aunt.”

“It’s always mothers with Italians. Mothers and grandmothers and daughters.”

Snafu makes a sarcastically impressed noise in the back of his throat and feels her eyes on him. He doesn’t look at her, and another silent minute passes.

“Do you have a problem with me?” she demands impatiently. “Not that I mind—but if it’s going to cause a problem with the spell I paid for, I’d rather know now.”

“No problem,” Snafu says smoothly, folding his arms. His eye is riveted on the candle flame, and he blurts out what he’s thinking without meaning to. “’S just funny. Most Marines I’d know would do anything to forget just about everything that happened from the time the war broke out to the time it ended. And here you are, wanting to remember it.”

He turns his head and looks at Sgt. Basilone, a challenge in his eyes, and she rises to meet it. She lifts her chin and looks down her nose at him, considering again—he wonders how many combat Marines she’s known. Besides her husband, the hero.

“That’s not true, though, is it?” she says slowly. “Because _you_ could erase it all, if you wanted to. I think you could. But you haven’t—have you even tried?” It never occurred to him, and his silence is his answer. “You don’t really want to forget everything,” the sergeant continues, not looking at him, facing forward and staring at the kettle. “You want to forget the pain. The people are all right. All the people you met, the ones who helped you, made you happy... the question, I guess, is what do you do when the people bring you pain. Intentionally or otherwise. Do you throw out the baby with the bathwater? Most people, given the chance, really don’t want to.”

Her words are unexpectedly poignant, and Snafu mulls them over in the silence that follows. He thinks about Burgie and Sledge and Bill and Jay De L’eau. He wouldn’t want to forget them, that’s true. He thinks of Peck and Hamm and the rains of Gloucester and sores on Guadalcanal and traitorous mortars on Okinawa and says, with a viciousness that surprises even him, “You don’t know what it was like.”

Sgt. Basilone is startled—by his attitude more than the words, he thinks. She has heard them before.

“No,” she says. “I suppose I don’t.”

The kettle begins to whistle. Snafu takes it off the stand and pours a cup, and politely hands it to the sergeant. She blows on it softly and whispers Psalm 23 under her breath. She sips the brew, pulls a face, and then drains it all at once. Then she closes her eyes and Snafu is hit with a burst of memory that makes him draw in his breath. He can’t sort it out, he can’t really try, he just thinks _John John John_ and feels a tight ache in his heart.

“Thank you,” Sgt. Basilone says curtly, and she turns around and walks through to the main room. She pauses at the door and then turns around sharply, practically snapping her heels. Her dark eyes fix on Snafu’s. “Duration plus six was my time, too. I’m on leave now to see John’s family in New York, and then I’m leaving the Corps. I can’t tell you that I know what it’s like to be in combat—I don’t. I never will. But the best years of my life are behind me now. I have to live with that. You don’t know what that’s like.”

Snafu is about to retort that maybe he does, too—but he holds himself back. He can’t help but think that this would-be prophecy is a bit too optimistic for his taste… but, thinking back, he has a hard time choosing which years he would designate as “the best of his life.”

Instead of responding, he salutes her. It wouldn’t do on the parade grounds—his angle is slightly off, and he feels sloppy in his civvies—but Sgt. Basilone salutes him in return and gives him a small nod before she leaves. Delphine stands to return to the back room, and Snafu resumes his seat.

“What was that about?” Delphine asks, and Snafu tries to flash a cocky grin.

“Corps business, Delphine. A civilian like you wouldn’t understand.”

She rolls her eyes and mutters a few choice words to herself as she leaves. Snafu fixes his eyes on the door, waiting for more customers to arrive, but he doesn’t really see it. He keeps thinking of the Saint Michael candle and the way its light hit Sgt. Basilone’s wedding ring when she set the match to the wick. _Semper fi_ , he thinks idly.

 

vi. the witness

A man comes in one day looking for a spell. Snafu can tell right away—there’s something in the way he reacts to the candles. His nose twitches when he leans too close, like he inhaled pepper, and once in a while he picks up a candle and then hastily puts it down and rubs his fingers together, trying to peel away the feel of the wax. He is looking for a very specific spell, and he won’t find it here. He scans the rows of saints’ candles and sneers. Eventually—Snafu tilts his head and watches—he wanders down the shop, towards the candles that Delphine makes special. Those aren’t Catholic candles, ain’t even Christian ones, really, are made for the witches who don’t like mixing magic and religion. The man picks one up and frowns at it for a few moments, hefts it in his hands, and puts it back.

He puts his hands in his pockets and strolls over to the counter. He leans one elbow against it and says, “Let me ask you something,” and Snafu is hit so hard with an echo of cab horns and wind against brick and people shouting over the sound of seagulls that he blinks and lets the two front legs of his chair fall to the ground.

 _San Francisco_ , he thinks, and then _what are you doing here?_ and then, just as quickly, _war_. The world has been shaken up and settled strangely, and no one is where they belong.

“Go for it,” he says, stubbing out the remains of his cigarette in an ashtray.

“Are there any Jews in New Orleans?”

“You need a Jewish candle?” Snafu asks with a little grin on his face. The man does not grin back.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Sure, there are Jews in New Orleans. Come on.”

Snafu hops off his stool and flips the sign to _closed_.

“You don’t have to—”

“Can’t give you directions. You’d get lost. Come on.”

Snafu locks the door behind them, closes his eyes, and gently rests his hand on the brick wall of the building. He knows this city, knows the breath of it and the taste of the air, but he’s never gone looking for the Jewish neighborhoods before and he needs a moment to orient himself. He remembers once seeing a silver-branched menorah in the window of a four-story apartment building, three candles lit, and so he thinks silver and tastes the sting of polish on his tongue, and then sweet wine and the smell of bread and a hundred people chanting slightly out of tune and time, and the happy clatter of an unfamiliar language (not as smooth as French, not as heavy and sweet, but with its own cadence that bounces in his head), and paper rustling as it is passed around and grabbed and pointed to, and—

“Do you know where you’re going?”

His feet are moving already.

“Yeah.”

“You’re not a Jew.”

“This is my city. I know where to go.”

Snafu gets turned around twice but the man—Joe Liebgott, he introduces himself as—doesn’t notice or comment, and eventually they are standing in front of a small building with checkered blue curtains with a big sign on the window that reads JUDAICA: SHABBAT CANDLES, MEZUZAHS, TALLITOT, GIFTS, ETC., and another one that Snafu can’t read. Liebgott thanks him for the directions and goes inside, and Snafu follows him.

“What are you doing?” he asks sharply.

“Ain’t ever seen a Jewish candle before, and I’m in the business. Gotta learn, don’t I?”

Liebgott rolls his eyes and flashes a polite half-smile at the shopkeeper, a woman in her mid-40s with a brown scarf on her head. She nods in reply and gives Snafu a funny look, and the two men retreat amongst the shelves. There are a lot of candlesticks, some heavy and engraved and others simple, no more than a square block of wood, and a decent amount of candles. Most of them are tapers, uncolored or pure white or blue and these are the ones that Liebgott looks at, but immediately Snafu is attracted to a thick, braided candle with six wicks. He picks one up, ideas flashing through his mind about the spells that can be worked with it, multiple facets of a single wish, power woven in through each strand.

But the candle feels wrong. Like Liebgott in the shop, Snafu can feel himself being repelled by an object that was not made for him to handle. He sets it down and scratches absently at his palm, which is oddly numb.

“What are those for?” he asks, nodding packet of candles that Liebgott is holding. He could find out, of course, but he wants Liebgott to answer. Liebgott is looking at him suspiciously.

“Shabbos candles. You light them at the beginning of the Sabbath.”

“And what’s that one for?” he says, nodding at the one he just set down.

“It’s a Havdalah candle. You light it at the end of the Sabbath.”

“Why?”

“For someone who’s in the business, you don’t know much, do you?” Liebgott stares at Snafu for another moment and says, bluntly, “You’re a machsheifeh, aren’t you?”

Snafu doesn’t know the word but he knows the force behind it.

“Yeah.”

“Listen, do you know somewhere I could work a spell? My hotel room is shit. I swear to God five people have died in it—it makes everything…”

He shrugs and wiggles his hand, and Snafu understands. Ghosts and memories are tricky things. He glances at the candles again and his curiosity overwhelms him.

“Yeah,” he says. “Long as you don’t mind working in a Catholic apartment.”

Liebgott smirks.

“I got my own matches.” He picks up the braided candle and hefts it, considering. “This’ll do.”

He pays and they begin the walk back to the shop. Snafu only gets lost once.

“You’re not supposed to light a fire on the Sabbath,” Liebgott says as they pass by the shop window and walk around to the back, to the stairs that lead to Snafu’s apartment. “So you light the Havdalah candle to show that it’s over.”

“Huh.”

Snafu unlocks the door and stretches out an arm, cynically welcoming Liebgott into the room. It’s small, cramped like the shop downstairs but slightly less cluttered. Liebgott doesn’t say anything, just steps inside and kneels by the shabby coffee table. Snafu gets himself a beer from the fridge.

“Your folk use candles a lot?” he asks. “My ma never did—never even heard of candle magic till we moved up here.”

“No. I know how it’s done, though. Trying something new.” He takes a matchbox from his pocket and pauses thoughtfully. “Do you do magic in English? That would sound… stupid.”

Snafu shakes his head.

“French.”

“Eh. Not as bad.”

Then he takes a deep breath and closes his eyes for a moment, settling himself, and strikes the match.

Liebgott lights the candle and Snafu watches, memorized, as the flame catches on each wick. It always amazes him, the heat and light that a candle gives off—so little compared to electricity, of course, but always more than he expected, enough for him to feel waves of heat brushing against his face. Then Liebgott begins to speak in what Snafu _thinks_ is Yiddish, but he’s never really heard it spoken that much so he doesn’t know, and in any case it sounds somehow off. All his senses are coming to him through a clamor, and a chill runs down his spine as he realizes that the man is trying to make a curse.

Snafu has never seen anyone actually work a curse before. He’s seen the results, once or twice, and of course his mother taught him how to guard against them, but that had always been one of the rules. Don’t use magic for harm. Even for the caster, it never turned out well. Mischief was one thing, but ill will was something else and even now—after his mother’s death, after the war—Snafu shrinks away from it. All of the wicks together make a tall, steady flame, powerful but oddly serene, given what it is being asked to do.

After a moment, though, he realizes that Liebgott doesn’t know what he’s doing. His voice keeps wavering between force and uncertainty, and a few times he has to repeat himself, frustrated, because the words aren’t obeying the way they should. Two minutes into the spell, the flame splutters and shrinks. Liebgott grits his teeth and keeps going, his face red, but one by one the other wicks follow.

“ _Damn_ it!” he blurts out in the darkness. “God _damn_ it!”

He storms over to the light switch and flicks it on, and then lights himself a cigarette.

“What the fuck was that?” Snafu demands. “You didn’t tell me you’d be doing a voudou in my goddamn apartment.”

“A what?”

“Voudou. Bad spell. A curse.”

“We call it a shiltn.”

“What were you trying to _do_?”

Liebgott paces up and down for a moment, and then he gives up and throws himself onto Snafu’s couch. He doesn’t look at him.

“I was in the war,” he starts jerkily, and stops.

“Congratulations,” Snafu says sarcastically after twenty seconds of silence, and Liebgott glares at him.

“You?”

“Marines. Pacific.”

“European for me. France, Belgium, then Germany. When—when I was still out there, this kraut general gave a speech to his men. I heard it. Translated it for my CO. I remember he said—he said that they had served bravely and that they deserved long and happy lives of peace. And… they don’t.” He blows out a mouthful of smoke angrily. “Not all of them. They murdered _six million_ of my people and they get to go home and forget about it? I don’t fucking think so. If I don’t get to find peace than neither do they. I want them to remember my dead.”

 _I want to remember him_ , Lena Basilone’s voice whispers in Snafu’s ear. He is silent. After a moment he stands and joins Liebgott on the couch. Too close. Snafu always sits too closer, it makes people uncomfortable, but Liebgott doesn’t flinch.

“’S too big,” Snafu says. “You can’t curse all the people in Germany.”

“Not all of them. Just the guilty ones.”

Snafu keeps shaking his head.

“Too big,” he repeats. “Easier to make yourself forget. Whatever you saw.”

“No.” Liebgott runs a hand through his hair, agitated. “I don’t know these kinds of spells. No one ever taught me.”

Snafu brushes against Joe’s arm and hears _this is a spell to keep the pot hot all Shabbos_ and _sew this into your collar to keep the wind off the back of your neck_ and _tie this around your wrist to keep away curses and nightmares_. It is not powerful magic, but it is important magic. It reminds him of the spells his mother taught him in the kitchen, whispering low so that she was not heard. Spells for a life of peace.

“Sorry,” he mumbles. Liebgott shrugs.

Snafu is staring at a scar on the other man’s neck, jagged and white and undoubtedly a result of war, and without thinking very much he leans forward and kisses it. He tastes the bullet. Liebgott looks at him and Snafu can’t read his face—he might be sneering, but then, he seems to sneer a lot. Liebgott stubs his cigarette out on the table.

“Should get up early tomorrow,” he says. “Drive back to Frisco. I haven’t seen my folks since I got back… I’ve called them, but I—never went back. I dunno. Fuck it all.”

“Fuck it all,” Snafu agrees, and he kisses Liebgott’s jaw. “You could leave in the afternoon, though.”

“Yeah, I could.”

-

That night, Liebgott is asleep but Snafu isn’t. He lights a cigarette and stares at his ceiling and things about war, soldiers, civilians, witches. He looks down at the body beside him, pale in the darkness but dotted with freckles—birthmarks—here and there. Impulsively, he reaches down and begins to trace sigils on Liebgott’s back. _Community strength_ , he starts with. He’s only ever seen it used for Cajuns, but he thinks it will work for Jews, too. It’s a very vague spell. Then one for wanderers. There are many sigils for wanderers, usually those granting a safe journey, a speedy journey, a warm welcome at the end. This one is meant to ensure that the journey _has_ an end. So that the man doesn’t keep wandering forever. And finally, a sigil for peace.

Snafu rolls over and looks out of the window onto the moonlight hitting the roofs of the city. He tries not to think about anything in particular, and after a few hours he falls asleep. Liebgott is already gone when he wakes but the Havdalah candle is still sitting on his coffee table, half-burned down with six twisted black wicks.

 

 

vii.

Snafu sits on the roof of his building, smoking and staring unseeingly over the New Orleans skyline. This is his favorite time of day: when the sun has just set, leaving everything a vivid blue. The faintest chill lingers on his bare skin, but it’s not so heavy that he feels the need to put on a shirt or go back inside. Around him lie a few scattered dirty dishes, an empty beer bottle, and a small saucepan filled with crushed John the Conqueror root in water. Snafu is thinking about amulets. Every witch he’s ever known has had one—but the funny thing is that most of them aren’t magic.

Some are, of course. Bags of herbs and stones, blessed crucifixes and the like. But his mother also had a bracelet of wooden beads that clinked softly together and sounded, to his ears, like loud cicadas and creaking trees and laughter muffled into elbows and the words _je t’aime_ spoken with unselfconscious delight. Delphine has a necklace with a single pearl on the chain, and everyone knows pearls don’t hold magic well so it can’t be that. Snafu, personally, thinks it must be from her mother, who died when she was young. The woman on Okinawa, whom he tries not to think about too much, had a red string wound around her little finger that felt like quiet contentment, so unassuming that it had almost been lost among the bombs. Sunlight against hair and the touch of a familiar hand.

The light on the horizon is starting to fade, and his cigarette is just a stub. Snafu drops it into the empty beer bottle and thinks about Gene. He thinks about Gene a lot lately, because he’s the only veteran he really knows and war has changed him. Changed both of them, really, but Snafu knows what it did to him and he can’t tell what it did to Gene. Every once in a while Gene gets quiet and starts playing with a bit of string he keeps wrapped around his wrist; he takes it off and runs it through his fingers. He has a lot of amulets—Catholics often do—but that’s the only one that went to war with him. He didn’t bring his crucifix, because it’s made of silver and belonged to his father and is the most valuable thing he owns; he brought a St. Francis medal and then promptly lost it on a jump. Now he whispers his prayers over this old worn out string instead. Once it brushed against the top of Snafu’s arm and he was hit with a cold so acute that it shocked him into stillness for a full ten seconds.

Liebgott, on the other hand, had an amulet that had never known war, and that, Snafu guesses, was intentional. He wears a pendant around his neck, a gold-plaited chain on which hangs a charm of real gold. Two Hebrew letters. Snafu brushed against it a few times that night, but he doesn’t really _listen_ during sex; he gets too distracted, too wrapped up in his own mind. It wasn’t until that night, when he traced sigils onto Liebgott’s back and touched his fingers to the chain accidentally, that he really felt it. Impatience and terror ( _adolescence_ ) and a creaking, slow voice and relief and cool metal around his throat and soft, clean wool around his shoulders and sweet wine on his lips. Innocent pleasures, made all the warmer by nostalgia and bitterness for what-should-have-been. Snafu had taken a moment to marvel that such a boy could become such a man, but is he really surprised? Hasn’t he lived that, too?

Lena Basilone, like most widows he knows, still wears her wedding ring. And not on a chain around her neck, where she might occasionally forget, but on her finger, where she can see it and trigger those painful, happy memories she was so desperate to hold on to.

Snafu takes a deep drag from his cigarette and holds it in for a minute, enjoying the way the smoke scratches at his lungs. Then he exhales.

He swoops down suddenly and plucks a new spelled dime from the pot of water at his feet. It’s not like the dimes his mother and grandfather made. Not meant to keep away death—just a regular dime to bring good luck and happiness, and with a bit of crushed iris in with John the Conqueror so that his heart will be open to it when he comes. It can’t protect him. It won’t stop the pain… but really, the other one didn’t, either. Snafu doesn’t know how to live without pain, and more and more he’s starting to think that no one does. He won’t make himself forget it any more than Liebgott or Sgt. Basilone will—hell, Gene seeks out pain as a matter of principle. It’s fucked up, he thinks. It’s real fucked up.

Snafu takes the length of string from around his neck, unties it, and removes the first dime. He doesn’t get rid of it, though. He holds the two dimes together and winds the string through them both, and puts the necklace back on again. A content sigh and a thin stream of smoke escape his lips. He loves the feel of a new spell. Hope and promise. It doesn’t contain any of the details he gets from other people’s spells—no strange scents, no echoes of unfamiliar sounds—but it feels like _his_. He feels like himself again.

He closes his eyes and breathes in the city, and dreams of wind whispering through magicked bayou trees.

**Author's Note:**

> Les arbres, de l’eau, les vents, la terre: the trees, the water, the winds, the earth  
> Va cherche une corde, s’il te plait: Go find a string, please.  
> Defan: Cajun word, literally meaning “sainted,” used when referring to a loved one who has passed away  
> Candjateur/candjateuse: spell-caster (m./f.)  
> Tout-dans-les-monde: phrase used for a mischievous child. “Rascal,” maybe.  
> Chiennailleur: playboy, flirt
> 
> Gris gris, ouanga, voudou: all three of these words originate from Creole/African witchcraft and can be translated as “spell,” as a neutral; but according to the dictionary I referred to, voudou can also have negative connotations even in Creole and Cajun French. For that reason I’ve decided that the former two refer mostly to positive spells, which are vastly more common in Creole and Cajun folklore, and the latter to refer to negative spells.
> 
> Cultural notes: 1) I mentioned at one point that Snafu had practically never heard Yiddish before, despite earlier having him “hear” Jewish people speaking a Jewish language; that was intentional. For most of its history, Louisiana was home to a large number of Sephardic Jews, not Ashkenazim, so I believe the most common Jewish language in this location in this time period would be Ladino, not Yiddish. 2) The Riggi family practice Italian folk magic, which is a distinct type of magic from Stregheria, the more common form of Italian witchcraft today. 3) The ability of a traiteur/traiteuse is traditionally passed to an individual of another gender. I've expanded this concept to include all forms of Cajun/Creole magic. Also, the terms Cajun and Creole are not interchangeable generally; the former refers to people of Arcadian French descent, the latter of African descent. However, I have used them as such in this fic because, for a variety of reasons, there is a fair amount of overlap between these two cultures. Things like traditional foods, for example, are often more region-based than culturally-based, and cultural sharing results in similarities of language, songs, legends, etc.


End file.
